A universal predictive model of the cell would dramatically accelerate science, allowing biologists to perform experiments digitally. Today we’re announcing a major partnership with the DOE and NIH. The goal of this partnership is to generate the data that will be needed to build an accurate model of the cell with artificial intelligence. Isomorphic, Google DeepMind, and Meta are joining us as founding partners in the Virtual Biology Initiative. This is the beginning of a large scale coordinated effort to map cellular biology to power the development of digital models of life. Other leading scientific institutions and consortia including the Allen Institute, Broad Institute, Gladstone Institutes, the Human Cell Atlas, the Human Protein Atlas, the Wellcome Sanger Institute, as well as NVIDIA, are working together as part of this international scientific project. Creating a predictive model of the cell is one of the most important challenges for the next decade of science. The insights that come from this could unlock a far greater understanding of disease, and open new paths for cures. We invite the worldwide scientific community and other funders to join us in this effort.

Scaling laws are powering AI. It’s time to scale biology. Today we’re launching the Virtual Biology Initiative to generate the data to unlock scaling laws in biology and build accurate predictive models of the cell. Digital representations of proteins are already expanding our understanding of life at the molecular level, and accelerating the design of molecules and medicines. Accurate digital representations of the cell could reveal the mechanisms that are responsible for disease, and show how to reverse them. The protein data bank, and worldwide repositories of protein sequence biodiversity were created through decades of work by the scientific community. The advances in artificial intelligence for proteins would not have been possible without them. The cell is orders of magnitude more complex, and we will need to create the data in just a few years rather than decades. This will require a coordinated global effort. We're partnering with Broad, Wellcome Sanger, Arc, Allen, Human Cell Atlas, Human Protein Atlas, NVIDIA, and Renaissance Philanthropy. Biohub is contributing to this effort as both a funder and a builder. We are developing microscopy to observe millions of cells in living organisms, and cryo-ET to resolve the cell in atomic detail. We're building instruments that expand the range of modalities and parameters that can be simultaneously measured. We’re developing molecular, cellular, and tissue engineering to create models of disease and design interventions. The data we generate will be available to the worldwide scientific community. We’re also committing $100M over the next five years to support work beyond Biohub. We invite other scientific teams and funders to join. Link: